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shirt at
the armpits and lower back. Although the pressure to wipe his face was great,
his arm seemed to be made of lead.
    The unmistakable buzz of a mosquito
nestled in his ears, and then another, and another, until the movement of the
bloodsuckers’ wings was all he could hear. A swarm was surrounding him,
attracted by the delicious scent of his sweat, which was seeping out of him in profuse
fashion. There was bug spray in the tower with him, just a foot away, and he
should have reapplied it, except he couldn’t reach for it, or, for that matter,
move at all.
    The winged party-crashers closed in
and landed and sunk anchors in his skin where the blood was closest to the
surface. These were the best tethering points, if you asked them.
    They couldn’t get at his ankles, which
were covered with socks and pants, and there were some darned good spots there,
but they had easy access to his face and neck and wrists, with which they’d
have to make do. There was more than enough hitching space, so they docked to
him and slaked their thirst while their winged bodies were caressed by the
gentle stirring of the unseasonably chill night air.

11
    While something in Corks’s mind, some protective wall that had enabled him to
function in spite of what the virus had done, got yet closer to breaking for
good, Senna and Alan walked Rosemary back to her house and said their goodbyes.
    The girl opened her front door, spilling
light from the house onto New Crozet’s carpet of semi-dark, then went in and
pulled the door shut behind her, leaving the spilt light stranded on the porch.
It could’ve fled to Senna and Alan for comfort, but instead resigned itself to
its fate and floated upward, finding a place for itself on the border of one of
the moon’s ashier cheese holes, where it would toil until daybreak.
    Rosemary said a perfunctory hello to
her mother, Elizabeth Clark, who’d stayed up waiting for her daughter. In New
Crozet, parents or those serving in that role usually didn’t go with their
children when Senna and Alan took them to the fence for training. If there was
trouble, the parents would likely only get in the way.
    Elizabeth had much on her mind and
much to do, responsible as she was for organizing the market, but she’d been
unable to focus on any of her tasks while Rosemary was away at the fence, so
she’d spent the evening worrying. It would have been easier for her to keep
distracted if Tom Preston, Rosemary’s father, had been home, but he was out on
a routine perimeter patrol, so there had been no one to fuss over while she
waited. Elizabeth tried to engage her daughter in conversation, interested to
know how the night had gone, but Rosemary made little attempt at a response.
    Dazed and nauseated, and having fended
off her mother’s questions, she slunk up the stairs, went to her room, and
closed the door.
    The Preston house was two stories and
spacious, and having her own room was a welcome extravagance for a girl like Rosemary,
who valued her privacy and spent much of her time alone. She had a place to
escape to, as well as some disused rooms on the second story, and the attic to
stow herself in when she really needed to vanish without a trace.
    When she was by herself, she liked to
think about the world, and about solitude. She wanted to believe that there was
a reason for what had happened, and that there was some meaning in it. She
always tried to believe that.
    The fact that the animals had been
taken away from people in particular struck a chord with her. She’d seen
pictures in the magazines and books in the library of people with cats and dogs
and horses and other animals, sometimes even lizards.
    She wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen a
picture of a deer before, but it wouldn’t have surprised her if she had. The
pictures of animals she saw in books didn’t stick in her mind. They were
abstractions, unreal constructs whose images failed to bear them out into flesh
and blood concepts for